Business Agility

Business Agility covers using the technical agility delivered by virtualization and cloud computing to improve business agility, performance and results. This includes the agility derived from the proper implementation of Agile and DevOps methodologies, the agility derived from proper application and system architectures, ...

the agility derived from the proper implementation of Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) clouds, the agility derived from proper monitoring of the environment coupled with a process to resolve problems quickly, and the agility derived from have continuous availability through the use of high availability and disaster recovery products and procedures in place.

Featured Solutions

VMware purchased Nicira, backed the Openflow Community, and is now touting software defined data centers (SDDC). But what is a software defined datacenter? Is it just virtualization or cloud with a software defined network? Or is it something more than that? Given heavy automation and scripting of most clouds, do we not already have SDDC? If not where are we going with this concept? What does SDN add to the mix?

Citrix XenClient Enterprise 4.1, first full release since the Virtual Computer acquisition. How does 4.1 compare with previous versions? How has NxTop been utilised? FlexCast missed corporate laptops, does XenClient give an enterprise desktop virtualization platform for laptops?

Perhaps with the release of 2012, Microsoft have a rare moment of being a vendor that made a change to product licensing without upsetting someone. There are now only four Windows 2012 Licensing versions, and licensing is processor and client access license based. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to be hard.

There has been quite a lot of twitter traffic about the FrankenCloud recently: A cloud with more than one type of hypervisor underneath it. One example, is to build a cloud using Hyper-V three and vSphere, both managed through Microsoft System Center. Another example, is to build a cloud using Hyper-V, KVM, and vSphere all managed through HotLink. But is this a desired cloud topology?

In our intro on Agile Cloud Development, we articulated why we think this is the future of software development. Today we’ll kick off the Dev in the Cloud series with a look at Continuous Integration (CI) and the cloud’s impact on this popular agile development practice. We’ll explain how CI is the essential building block for Continuous Deployment, the secret sauce for start-ups from Facebook to Netflix.

The drive to virtualize business critical workloads is going to require more vSphere licenses. Shifting low hanging fruit workloads to Hyper-V may free up licenses. But it creates a cross-hypervisor management problem that could erode all of the savings from Hyper-V licensing. This puts a premium on cross-hypervisor management solutions.

One of the decisions faced by anyone that wishes to have a cloud presence is what will be moved to the cloud, why, and whether or not there is a service that can be used instead of using virtual machines. Give The Virtualization Practice’s case, we plan on moving our customer facing VMs to the cloud, but what are those machines? The most important are a Web Server with a split LAMP stack, a Mail Server, and DNS.